


Epipogium Aphyllum

by blueincandescence



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, formerly part of my Experimental Design drabble collection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 00:05:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8034241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueincandescence/pseuds/blueincandescence
Summary: Bruce and Natasha bond over the rare plant he once sent to Betty.





	Epipogium Aphyllum

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt — 8/4/15 Anon — Brucenat prompt (sort of): them talking about Betty Ross

_2013_

“How beautiful,” Natasha says and makes an actual beeline toward the potted flower on the other side of the open living room. On the entire floor Tony furnished him with, Bruce has exactly one sentimental possession. And the Widow has gone right for it.

Bruce follows her, hands working behind his back. He hangs in her periphery, watching her admire the single, delicate bulb.

She lifts her eyes to his in expectation. “What is it?” The prompt holds a hint of censure for lack of social niceties, as if she hasn’t just shown up at his door unannounced and uninvited.

“Epipogium aphyllum,” he replies and adds, “A variety of ghost orchid,” when she raises a brow.

“Intriguing,” Natasha says, drawing out a smile to match. “Where did it come from?”

“The Himalayas.” He closes his mouth around the word. Taking the seeds had been a crime, technically speaking. Although not one in the SHIELD purview.  

Natasha grazes a petal with the pad of her index finger. Her mouth twitches when his arms do, giving him away. ‘What is it to you?’ was the question she’d really been asking. Her gaze falls across the paper half tucked under the pot, a long long list of instructions for the orchid’s care. The letter that the instructions was folded in is tucked in his bedside table, well away from prying eyes. But enough is conveyed in the looped handwriting, unmistakably feminine, and the shorthand, painfully intimate.

Before she can get in another side-long inquiry, he pushes his front and center: “Why are you here, Natasha?”

Her small smirk turns toward amusement. “To ask you that very question, Bruce.”

“Tony invited me.”

“To work?”

“Yes.” Only Natasha can make him feel so cagey about the answer to such an obvious question.

“Part of Tony’s work, if you weren’t aware, is to consult for SHIELD.”

“Ah,” Bruce says. Of course Fury would send her. Her recruitment tactics worked on him once already. Strange that they had and no doubt will again. The straightforward intensity of her stare never fails to pierce him to his adrenal medulla — fight or flight and other base hormonal responses. He would like to be evolved enough not to stare back.

Natasha’s attention slides again to the orchid, apparently satisfied to let SHIELD’s directive go unoffered for a moment longer. She murmurs, “Epipogium aphyllum. She really is beautiful.” Her eyes fall on the note again. “And high-maintenance.”

He snorts. “She prefers ‘complex’ or ‘challenging.’” Bruce had called Betty fussy, and she’d laughed. He’d called her smothering and a pain in his ass, too, because he’d been young and stupid and had loved her so much he’d cried uncle and begged her to stop. It hadn’t worked. Neither had leaving not once but twice. It never would, or so she’s written in her letter. Betty is marrying Leonard Samson in the spring.

Bruce wonders if Natasha knows that. It’s probable; what he’d seen of the SHIELD file on the flight to the Helicarrier had been comprehensive. If she does, he sees no pity in her smooth expression and she says nothing about it.

What Natasha does say is, “It’s a hell of a regimen. She’ll force you to stick around.”

‘I think that was the idea,’ he can say, or, ‘Where else do I have to go?’ or, more precisely, ‘I owe it to her.’ What Bruce does say is, “She’ll make your job easier, then.”

Natasha’s smile reaches her eyes, sending the effect of her stare onto a whole new level. He can’t look away until she does.

He pivots, clearing his throat to get ready to negotiate. If Fury is asking nicely again, he can at least get his hands on some SHIELD research for his trouble. And he’ll push for the bare minimum of contact. The devil you know and all that. He glances over his shoulder at Natasha. She’s scrutinizing the orchid as if it were some kind of rosetta stone, index finger tapping the note. Complex and challenging — Bruce isn’t surprised to discover it’s what attracts Natasha, too.

* * *

_2014_

“Wait, wait, wait,” Natasha says, her words stopping Bruce’s hand from injecting the nutrients into the soil. “Lemme do it.” Still crouching with him, she scoots closer and takes the syringe. She makes sure when she does it to brush as much skin as physically possible. What can she say? The man knows how to work a blush.

And yet he remains resolutely professional; she enjoys pushing people who don’t fall over. “Only to the halfway line,” he instructs. “Excellent,” he says when she’s played the diligent lab assistant. The role, by now, comes as close to natural as anything does for her. “The rest gets injected directly into the root.”

“Where?” she asks, leaning closer. Her show of concentration is immaculate. His, by the sound of his almost inaudible inhale, is momentarily interrupted by the scent of her shampoo.

The tip of his finger brushes the dirt to expose a slender, green root. “There,” he says. His voice has gentled.

There’s something so melancholy about the love he pours into this thing. She’s still curious. The orchid came as one of those grand romantic gestures she assumes people learn to replicate from movies. Part brush-off, part promise of everlasting love. It set Bruce up for a choice: give it back to win her back or accept it and wallow forever in self-sacrifice. No surprise he picked the latter, but the question of why — really why, beyond the obvious — keeps wriggling further and further under her skin.

After injecting the nutrients, she gives him her attentive ‘awaiting further instructions’ look that always inspires a bemused chuckle.

“That’s where the instructions end,” he says, apologetic.

Natasha props her hand on the table and rests her chin there. “So now we let the fungal symbionts do their thing.”

Mimicking her, Bruce says, “I still can’t believe you’re into this.” He says it genially enough, but Natasha can feel a frown tugging at her lip. It’s a constant refrain from him. It’s meant to be self-deprecating — even in into his forties, he’s fixated on eighties nerd-cool kid dichotomies; she blames the works of John Hughes. But Natasha wonders if there isn’t something else underneath his lack of belief. If what he doesn’t believe in — will never believe in — is her. SHIELD is gone, but in the back of his mind he must still think she’s working him.

And maybe she is, in a way. To the same end, though, she isn’t, she can’t be. The lullaby requires trust and trust means a lot of things. One of them is belief in sincerity.

So she jokes, “A girl can’t be a master assassin and still like flowers?” She does, though not particularly. What she likes is growth she can watch.

He chuckles. “I would never presume to place limitations on you, Nat.” His face is so close beside hers she can see how deep the creases are in his smile lines. She wonders if she’s done enough smiling in her life to warrant some when she’s older. If that day will come.

Natasha sits back so she’s lounging on the wood flooring. The fresh-squeezed lemonades Bruce made them are next to her on coasters. She picks his up and takes a philosophical sip from the straw marked by his teeth. “How long before it dies?”

When Bruce stretches out, he leaves about a foot more space between them than there was before. “It needs a better filtration method. I’ve been thinking about designs for a pot that filters the nutrient compound at more regular intervals.”

“So, not on your watch, then?” She leans heavy on the sarcasm, but, God, for such a deep cynic Bruce is awfully altruistic. Endearingly so. Not that he’ll believe her if she tells him she thinks so. Not that she will. She likes complex. She doesn’t like complications.

“This particular specimen must be one of the rarest orchids on the planet.” Bruce lifts a hand to properly gesticulate his excitement. “An epipogium aphyllum that can thrive indoors at ambient temperatures and moderate sunlight, and in an eighteen-inch diameter pot no less. People have won awards for far, far less.”

He picks up the remaining lemonade. She sees the second he notices it isn’t his. The corner of his mouth tucks up around the straw, and he takes a long drink.

Natasha raises hers in toast. “To the horticultural genius of Betty Ross.”

Bruce blinks at her. It takes a moment too long to realize she’s never said that name out loud to him nor he to her. She’s existed alongside them but has never been discussed. Natasha finds that absurd, raises her glass higher.

“To Betty,” Bruce agrees. That same melancholy hangs on his smile after the toast, along with another weight she can’t place until he finally asks, “Is there anything about me that you don’t have intel on?”

The truth is the least she can give him. “At least mine’s out there now, too. By choice.” She understands the difference, she really does.

Bruce nods. Says, “Hard choices,” like another toast between them. Although that one really merits a splash or four of vodka.

“Why? Why the hard choice every time?” It slips out of her mouth, sours the conversation. But she means it.

“Natasha, you know why.”

“No. I don’t. You remember I was there at Culver. The Big Guy protected her.”

“He put her in the ICU first.” It’s said softly, but the rigid set of his face and body speak to how tightly and quickly Bruce has closed himself off.

“You don’t believe,” Natasha summarizes, “in forgive, let alone forget.”

A bit of that rigidity loosens and he holds both hands in front of him. “I’m speaking for myself and myself alone.” He moves them to indicate an unbalanced scale. “Old dog, new tricks — can’t teach.”

She says, “Don’t limit me, Doc,” and layers meaning under it that she didn’t intended.

Bruce doesn’t seem to notice. He’s staring at the ghost orchid like it’s lived up to its namesake. “She really is brilliant,” he says to himself, to his memories.“It was a longshot, sending her those seeds. But I knew if anyone could grow a Eurasian ghost orchid in Virginia, it was Betty.” Sincere belief turns Bruce’s voice sweet and throaty. One more piece of intel Natasha has on him.

* * *

_2015_

“I’m better at the other thing,” a woman’s voice says from the far corner of the porch.

Betty jumps but keeps a grip on her epipogium aphyllum and the new pot it has been placed in. She’s just been wondering who put it on her porch, who oversaturated it in a bid to keep it alive.

Even under dark, oversized sunglasses, she recognizes the woman with the red hair and tight lips from the news. She recognizes her from four years ago when she’d pretended to be a master’s degree applicant to find out what Betty knew of Bruce. Now she knows nothing, but she’s pretty sure by the dismal state of the petals that the speculation is true — neither Bruce Banner nor the Hulk has been sighted since Sokovia.

“Is he okay?” Betty asks. She wishes Leonard were home, she wishes Karen were in her arms. She never imagined Bruce could die, not as he is, but, then, she’d never imagined aliens attacking New York or robots dropping a city from the sky.

Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, explains, “He chose to leave.” The set of her jaw is hard, but Betty sees something fragile there, too. Or maybe not. Leonard is always accusing her of projecting her own heart onto other people. Natasha gestures at the orchid. “The pot helped for awhile, but I think it needs to be changed out somehow.”

Betty holds up the pot to get a better look. She knocks on the clay. Hollow, so there must be a filtration system running it through it. Bruce never could help himself when it came to improving on her designs. She’s never been able to decide if she loves that or hates it more. “I don’t know about the pot,” Betty says, “but I think I still have some things that might save the orchid.” She knows she does. The love she’d poured into those seeds and this flower was something she needed to move forward with; the effort she’d put in to doing the near impossible deserved to be enshrined in her home office.

Natasha nods. “Thank you.” She starts to move past Betty, headed for the steps.

Betty lays a gentle hand on Natasha’s wrist. “It’s better if I teach you. In case this happens again.”

Natasha’s face goes still under those sunglasses. “He didn’t give the orchid to me. He left her.”

Left Natasha, too, Betty infers for certain now. The truth stings a little. She’d been able to move on because Bruce had made it clear he never would. But she guesses that is still true. Betty finds no satisfaction in that. Ghosts are hell to live with.

“It’s not mine anymore,” she tells Natasha.

Her sunglasses are pointed toward the opposite corner of the porch where Karen’s bouncy swing waits for laughter to fill it. She takes them off and regards Betty with dry eyes that nonetheless brim with so much more emotion than Betty would have imagined. “It’s your work. Bruce told me how impressive what you accomplished is. Show it off.”

Betty smiles down at her epipogium aphyllum. What kept her from publishing her work had been the personal and professional ethics of where the seeds came from, since Bruce had been on the run when he illegally removed them from their habitat. Now Bruce doesn’t need her protection and, frankly, she’s weathered worse ethics clouds than this one. “All right,” she agrees. “Thank you.”

Natasha nods again, and Betty sees relief before she covers her face with those sunglasses once more. What kind of understanding can Betty offer without coming off as condescending? Natasha isn’t as emotionless as the press has made her out to be, but that doesn’t mean she would welcome an invitation to split a bottle of wine and vent. Maybe someday.

For now, Natasha does look lighter. She even gives a small smile. “Goodbye,” Natasha says. Not to Bruce, Betty is certain, but to the ghost orchid. Betty, who’ll always be the General’s daughter, understands what it is to remove the weight of other people’s symbolism. And your own, she thinks when Natasha reaches out to stroke a petal.

Something Bruce used to say comes to mind: ‘Not forgive and forget; make amends and remember.’ Betty has a feeling that Natasha and Bruce have more in common than just being Avengers. Leonard will enjoy discussing that with her later. He’s been giving lectures on the released SHIELD psych evaluations.

Natasha is halfway down the walk, but Betty is suddenly gripped by a need for memorial. “Wait, please,” she says, and places the orchid back on the step. “Just one moment.” She opens her front door and turns back to make sure that Natasha has paused.

She’s drawn off her sunglass again, too, which is a good enough sign that Betty feels comfortable darting into the house. In her office, she finds the spores and puts a few into a tin.

“Pleopeltis polypodioides,” she tells Natasha after she makes it to the walk. “The resurrection fern, my variation. Ferns don’t flower, but I’ve bred these exquisite red patterns onto the leaves. Almost nothing kills it, and it can grow anywhere — outdoors, indoors, in sunlight, in shade. Just give it some soil and watch it go.” Betty reads more than one question on Natasha's beautiful, inexpressive face and decides to answer the least wrought. “It has a huge amount of meaning. Ferns are medicinal, but more so they symbolize protection. And it has meaning for travelers and honors soldiers and it stands for sincerity — ” Betty is happy to stop her rambling when Natasha arches a brow.

“All right,” she says, and takes the tin. Their fingers brush, a little human comfort. “Thank you, Betty.”

“Be safe, Natasha.” She means it in every way you could say that to a person who saves the world and loves Bruce Banner.

Betty takes a seat on the porch beside her epipogium aphyllum. She watches Natasha kick her leg over a motorcycle to depart for a life of sacrifice Betty can only imagine the half of. She worries over Bruce and wishes him well. She waits for her family to come home to her.

**Author's Note:**

> The orchid (though I had to make up what it is) is from The Incredible Hulk deleted scenes. Search for them on YouTube — they're well worth watching! Karen is Betty's mother's name.


End file.
